How long does it take a rocket ship to get to the
moon, and how fast will the rocket be going?

Question Date: 2008-01-10

Answer 1:

A rocket ship, on its way to the moon, can get
up to almost 25,000 miles per hour in order to
escape the Earth's atmosphere. However, it does
not go that fast the whole way. Also, the ship
cannot fly directly from the Earth straight to
the moon surface. When it gets to the moon, the
rocket needs to fly around and figure out a good
spot to land. The first mission to stop on the
moon with astronauts on it, Apollo 11, landed
about four days after leaving the Earth surface.

Note: According to Wikipedia, Apollo 11
launched on 16 July 1969, landed on the moon 20
July, and returned to Earth on 24 July. The crew
spent approximately two hours on the Lunar
surface.

Answer 2:

I believe I remember reading that the Saturn V
rocket took around four days to make the trip to the
moon. The moon is about 384,000 km from Earth. You
do the math.

(The number I am
getting in my head is a little less than one
kilometer per second, or about 3,000 km/h, or
about 2,000 mi/h)

I think that the Chinese
are planning on repeating this particular
experiment. We will see what they come up with.
The Soviets tried it, but never made it.

Answer 3:

The whole area of space travel, and all the
research and missions carried out by NASA are
really interesting. There is a lot of material you
can read on these topics, I am sure your local
library has more than just a few books. You might
want to ask them.

I'll use the first
successful mission to take men to the moon to
answer your question. It took Apollo 11, that's
the spaceship that carried Neil Armstrong, Michael
Collins and Buzz Aldrin to the moon in 1969, 4
days 6 hours and 45 minutes to get to the moon.
They took off from the Kennedy Space Center in
Florida at 1:32 pm on 7/16/1969, and the lunar
module landed on the moon at 8:17 pm on 7/20/1969.
The speed needed for Apollo 11 to break free of
the Earth's gravitational field was about 7 miles
per second.

Apollo 10, a spaceship that only
orbited the moon in 1969 holds the record for the
highest speed attained by a manned vehicle with
11.08 km/s (24,791mph).

Thanks for this
really interesting question.

Answer 4:

The rockets that took the Apollo astronauts to
the moon in 1969 took a whole day to get to the
moon, and another day to get back.